If I think about China

If I think about China I have to think also about the system in which I live. Europe, democracy, free speech. If I say that China is a country which gives a shit about human rights…. I have to think twice. Not about China. In China there is no free speech. The internet for example in censored. There is no free access on a website like BBC. If one uses MSN there is automated censorship of certain terms – with the help of Microsoft. And there is my point: Nobody googles freely in China because of google-implemented censor search algorithms. What is perfectly ok for Google with it's Don't be evil - code of conduct (fucking hypocrites). The point is that there are a lot of companies from the so called free world which help China in it's attempt to control the internet and censor free speech. Google, Yahoo, Dell, Microsoft etc. They all provide China with the hard- and software to control the expression of it's people. I don't want to go into this more deeply now but it is clear: We in the free world are deeply interwoven with this totalitarian system. What I see are two movements. First the movement of China to a more open society. Second the movement of the free world to at least a less democratic one. Isn't George W. Bush II, one of the biggest failures in the recent US history, promoting water boarding – a torture? Aren't the US maintaining detention camps where detainees can be hold for years without access to the most basic civil rights which are granted in the US constitution. Isn't the CIA free to kidnap anybody right from his front door, flying him half around the globe to whichever Guantanamo for interrogation? Didn't European governments knew about this praxis and preferred to pretend to know nothing? Or think about this one: Hasn't George W. Bush II been a plain simple stupid liar when it came to Iraq? So are we really justified to point our fingers on China when it comes to human rights?

BBC-article about internet censorship

2008 Annual Report of Reporters without Borders page 76 about China.